Joanna Scanlan: 'I've never even tried to be funny'

Joanna Scanlan hit her comic stride in ‘The Thick of It’. But now she’s
getting serious, with a role in Ralph Fiennes' new Dickens film The
Invisible Woman

Joanna Scanlan is best known for her comic TV roles, but is soon to hit the big screen as Charles Dickens's wife in The Invisible WomanPhoto: Rick Pushinsky

By Stuart Husband

11:30AM GMT 07 Feb 2014

Joanna Scanlan isn’t overly keen on having her picture taken. Not that she’s some passive-aggressive Prima Donna; far from it. As she gamely poses for photographs in the gloomy cigar-smoking lounge of a London hotel, she’s low-key charm personified (“Is that Fidel Castro?” she asks, casting her eye over the rogue’s gallery of stogy-chuffers lining the walls. “Oh no, it’s Pavarotti. I’ll put that down to the bad light, rather than a lack of artistic verisimilitude”). It’s just that, she elaborates later, over coffee on the adjoining terrace, she’s not that keen on the idea of overexposure: “It’s very easy, if you’re successful in our business, to get a long way from real life, and I need to feel connected,” she says, in measured, analytical tones that she occasionally subverts with a ripe cackle. “For me, the greatest thing is anonymity. What would I do if I couldn’t get the bus, and eavesdrop, and listen to what’s going on in people’s lives?” She shakes her head vigorously. “I’d be out of a job.”

She’s not joking. The ability to listen in and take notes is key to Scanlan’s brand of acute, observational comedy, as exemplified by her two best-known roles: the bumbling “fart in a frock” PR Terri Coverley in political satire The Thick of It; and the overburdened, status-obsessed Sister Den Flixter in Getting On, the geriatric-ward sitcom written by Scanlan and her co-stars Jo Brand and Vicky Pepperdine. Watching the sitcom, in which the black-as-pitch “com” arises from the bleakest and starkest of “sits”, it’s easy to believe Scanlan’s claims that she’s not inspired by comedy as such – at least, not the punchline-at-all-costs style of comedy. At home in south-east London, she watches documentaries; it’s her accountant husband, Neil, who prefers the sitcoms. “Reality is always the jumping-off point for me,” she says. “What you do is just tweak it slightly, to bring out all the inherent absurdities lurking just beneath the surface.”

Joanna Scanlan with the cast of The Thick of It (Photo: BBC)

The sense of barely-contained desperation that Scanlan brings to her most indelible creations is given a Victorian spin in her latest big-screen outing. In The Invisible Woman, she plays Catherine Dickens, wife of Charles who, having borne Dickens 10 children, is about to be banished from his life in favour of an 18-year-old actress, Nelly Ternan. Ralph Fiennes, who also directed the film, plays Dickens as a force of nature, already hugely famous, staging animated readings of his own work, presiding over all-night parties, and smitten by Felicity Jones’s assured, porcelain-cool Nelly. It’s in fact the latter who is the invisible woman of the title, secreted in a Peckham hidey-hole to avoid scandal, but the title could equally apply to Catherine, fading into the background in her starched black crinolines. Scanlan’s portrayal has all the stoic dignity of a woman who’s long played broodmare second fiddle. The reviews have been rapturous, with one American critic calling hers “the finest performance of the year”, and suggesting that Scanlan be nominated for an Oscar.

InClaire Tomalin’s Dickens biography, the author writes damningly of Catherine that “Dickens didn’t want a wife who would compel his imagination.” Scanlan nods at the line. “My feeling about her, from what I’ve gleaned, is that Catherine wasn’t a great match for Dickens, certainly not intellectually. They obviously had a decent sex life, or they wouldn’t have ended up with 10 kids. But she was rather bourgeois and proper, and you get the sense that somehow he fundamentally wasn’t. In his soul there was an element of the gipsy, and he lived many secret lives – his diary is jam-packed with hundreds of little codes.”

She says that she made a conscious decision not to delve too deeply into Catherine’s circumstances before shooting began: “I knew her position in the story would be one of utter misery, so if I knew too much, I’d start resenting the script, and be trying to advocate on her behalf. Catherine didn’t seem to be angry at any stage, or even self-pitying. In the end, I think she accepted the maternal role, even toward her erstwhile husband and his mistress.”

Did Scanlan feel similarly nurturing toward Fiennes? “Well, Ralph is a force of nature too,” she laughs. “It really helped that we have these scenes where Dickens is directing his productions, and that was mirrored by Ralph. It was seamless – even the fact that he grew his own Dickens beard was part of that. It wasn’t like having someone come on in Elephant Man make-up, then taking it off to shout ‘action.’ It all flowed.”

Joanna Scanlan in The Inivisible Woman with co-star and director Ralph Fiennes (Photo: David Appleby)

Although she has been directed by actors before, notably by Peter Capaldi in Getting On (for the record, she thinks Capaldi will be “a Chippendale of a Dr Who” – not in the wearing-a-bow-tie-with-no-shirt sense, but in a “beautifully-crafted, very wrought, authentic William Hartnell/Patrick Troughton” sense), Scanlan says that working with Fiennes was instructive. “Although I’ve done films before, I’ve never had to cope with the kinds of close-ups that I had here. I’m a character actor – they don’t tend to come in on me. So I was floundering around. But Ralph knows exactly how you can communicate with minimal movement. At one point, he said to me: ‘Do exactly the same as you did before, but don’t blink.’” She beams. “It was all so useful.”

So is she hungry for more big-screen close-ups now? “What I’m actually hungry for is the quality of the detail that surrounds you in a film,” she says avidly. “The costumes, the production design, all the stuff that television doesn’t have the time or money to invest in. I remember my first film, Girl With a Pearl Earring; I walked onto the set in Luxembourg, as the housekeeper, into a fully working 17th-century Dutch kitchen. I could have knocked up a pancake or boiled your smalls. Your imagination takes flight from that. Likewise, in The Invisible Woman, Catherine’s costumes made me feel like an upholstered armchair – I could barely move. I felt trapped, and that was half the character right there.”

Scanlan grew up in North Wales, where her parents were hoteliers. She remembers ringing room service and asking for fillet steak every so often, which was “maybe the only advantage of the entire set-up”. Having studied history at Cambridge, where she was in the Footlights alongside Simon Russell Beale, Hugh Bonneville and Tilda Swinton (hence Swinton’s appearance in the Getting On finale), she left with the intention of becoming an actress. “But it suddenly seemed impossible to make that shift,” she says now. “Some things happened – my boyfriend and I started a theatre company, then our relationship broke down, and I was catapulted into depression and an inability to work out what adult life was about.” She ended up living on a south-east London council estate, working in a community theatre – “doing the panto, disability workshops, everything” – and living hand-to-mouth. “I’d had a pretty privileged existence up till then, but my parents had lost all their money and weren’t able to help me.” She eventually got a job teaching Stanislavkian method acting at Leicester University, and broke back into acting again in her mid-thirties (she’s now 52), with bit-parts in Peak Practice, The Bill and EastEnders, before landing a recurring role in Doc Martin in 2004 and making her film debut in Girl With a Pearl Earring the same year. “Looking back, it was brilliant for me, because I went into the world, and had a fabulous education, which has been the bedrock of everything I’ve done since,” she says.

As someone who straddles comedy and drama, does she look for the funny in the tragic, and vice versa? “Oh, I never think of myself as funny, or even try to be funny,” she says blithely. “I find it weird that I’ve ended up doing a lot of comedy. I always put it down to being fat. If I was thin and did exactly the same thing, they’d call it Ibsen.” Hang on, though – while her ego is obviously robust enough that she doesn’t mind deploying her size when necessary, surely she’s not suggesting it’s a “get her in, she’s a fat bird” kind of situation? “I don’t know,” she laughs. “We need to make a few calls to casting directors. It’s always bigger women who end up doing comedy, but I don’t think I trade on it in the way that, say, Miranda Hart does. I try to play every situation straight, and sometimes it comes out funny and sometimes not. With Terri Coverley, it’s [The Thick of It creator] Armando Iannucci’s grasp of who that person is, and why she behaves as she does, that makes it funny. You know her type – she’s generic and painstakingly precise at the same time.”

The same could of course be said of Sister Den and her peers in Getting On, which marries Beckettian mordancy with a very English resignedness – “I can’t go on, I’ll have a Rich Tea, I’ll go on” – to winning effect. Scanlan has just shared the British Comedy Award for Best Sitcom with Brand and Pepperdine, to add to its haul of Baftas, and NHS workers are among the loudest in praising the veracity of its deadpan-bedpan tone. “The first rule for writing it was, do the research,” says Scanlan. “For instance, the way that everything in the NHS is quantified to the last nanosecond, so that the outsourced cleaner, on the zero-hours contract, has precisely seven minutes to run his cloth over five beds. But the consultant has to do her rounds, and if the two needs conflate and the timings start going off, there’s big trouble. The satire’s all there, waiting to be unlocked.”

There’s also a subtle anger pulsing away at the show’s heart, about the modern NHS and its mania for quantifying everything, divvying up staff and patients alike into league-tabled units. “Our characters are middle-aged, and they’re ground down by the system. They channel their anger against all the strictures into small acts of kindness for the patients, which amounts to a form of rebellion,” says Scanlan. “The political route feels so futile at this time – though, unlike Russell Brand, I think we have to engage, and I believe that leafleting, picketing, and communicating do have an impact – that the personal comes to the fore.

“And we all know that when we’re ill, someone smiling or bringing a glass of water at the right time can make a huge difference.” Getting On is currently on indefinite hiatus, with Scanlan and Pepperdine working on Puppy Love, a Wirral-based dog-training sitcom, that’s scheduled to start shooting in May (and was perhaps partly inspired by Scanlan’s own experiences with Millie, her rescue pit bull). But HBO’s American version of the show, starring Roseanne’s Laurie Metcalf in the Pepperdine role and Family Guy’s Alex Borstein in the Scanlan role, is up and running, and boldly taking American television into hitherto uncharted scatological territory with the Pepperdine character’s stool obsession, and the freshly-laid turd found on a chair on the ward in the opening episode.

“We were slightly worried, because their levels of disgust and revulsion as a nation are slightly more primed than ours,” grins Scanlan. “I mean, we don’t have the words ‘icky’ and ‘gross’ in British English. But the reviews have been saying it’s brave and important – much like the ones we got when the show first aired here – and they’re winning people over.” And what of the royalties? Will Scanlan soon be moving into the ultra-high-net-worth bracket? She demurs. “I can’t tell you exactly how much we’ve earned, but I will say that my husband and I are thinking that we might buy a hot tub for our garden.” Her face lights up. “And I’m so grateful – I really want a hot tub.”